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THREAD: African Americans account for 16 out 18 people who’ve died from COVID-19 in Richmond as of Monday. But health disparities here are nothing new. https://vpm.org/news/articles/13313/in-1918-pandemic-black-richmond-faced-new-virus-and-old-racism
THREAD: A century ago, the 1918 influenza pandemic hit both white and Black communities in Richmond hard. Around 550 Richmonders died in the month of October 1918 alone. Clipping from Roanoke World News.
THREAD: Black patients were shut out of most hospitals. This was peak Jim Crow. The systemic racism drove health outcomes. Clipping from the Times-Dispatch.
THREAD: Many Black Richmonders suffered and died alone. See this lurid news brief in the RTD.
THREAD: Eventually Black patients were allowed into an emergency hospital at the John Marshall school...but they were sequestered to the basement. (Photo of the school from @theValentineRVA)
THREAD: Banker/community leader Maggie Walker helped coordinate a “colored” emergency hospital at the Baker School, which was later described as an “antiquated fire trap.” (Photo from @theValentineRVA)
THREAD: By the time the pandemic hit, Richmond had a growing African American medical community. Dr. Sarah Jones and her husband, Miles, helped set up the city’s first Black hospital in 1903. (Photo from Libary of Congress American Memory)
THREAD: The Baker school emergency hospital was led by Dr. W.H. Hughes, a globe-trotting surgeon who had trained at some of Europe’s most prestigious medical centers, including London’s Bartholomew's Hospital and Paris’s Pasteur Institute.
THREAD: He worked alongside Dr. Bessie Tharps, the second African American to graduate Boston University’s medical school in 1916 with a postdoctoral stop at Harvard. She was a member of the NAACP and a suffragette.
THREAD: The emergency hospital was widely considered a success. Staff at the hospital seemed to hope this would lead to broader recognition and acceptance by the white establishment. See quote in RTD.
THREAD: But Governor Davis seemed to believe it was proof segregation was working:
"It is an excellent thing to have our colored people so well able to work out their own problems independent of white help and without any mixing of activity," he said. https://vpm.org/news/articles/13313/in-1918-pandemic-black-richmond-faced-new-virus-and-old-racism
"It is an excellent thing to have our colored people so well able to work out their own problems independent of white help and without any mixing of activity," he said. https://vpm.org/news/articles/13313/in-1918-pandemic-black-richmond-faced-new-virus-and-old-racism
THREAD: The Medical School of Virginia -- what is now part of Virginia Commonwealth University -- didn’t admit its first Black students until 1951, and didn’t desegregate its hospital until 1965. (Photo of early 1900s dentistry class from @theValentineRVA)
THREAD: And even before the current pandemic, research from VCU found a 20-year difference in life expectancies between Richmond’s mostly-Black Gilpin Court and mostly-white Westover Hills.
THREAD: And so Steven Woolf, a VCU professor specializing in health equity, calls the current pandemic “a new example of an old problem.”
“We’ll be back here again if we don’t deal with the root causes,” he said https://vpm.org/news/articles/13313/in-1918-pandemic-black-richmond-faced-new-virus-and-old-racism
“We’ll be back here again if we don’t deal with the root causes,” he said https://vpm.org/news/articles/13313/in-1918-pandemic-black-richmond-faced-new-virus-and-old-racism
